New Looks at NATO

MICHAEL G. ROSKIN

Suddenly, after 11 September, Russia is an ally and NATO is
unimportant. It is sometimes forgotten that alliances are based on interests, not on
abstract notions of "community." Russia and America, at least for a while, have
common interests in combating Islamic terrorists. Before, we criticized Russia for
brutality in Chechnya; now we stay silent. In 2001 NATO invoked Article 5--an attack on
one is an attack on all--of the 1949 treaty for the first time, but this requires nothing
specific from member countries, and that is what Europe delivered. What can NATO do in the
Middle East? If responsibilities there fall exclusively on the United States, NATO will
slide into irrelevance. Considering what could go wrong in the Gulf region--Saudi oil and
Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist terrorists--the Cold War in
Europe may seem like extended rest and recreation. One wonders if books on NATO
enlargement will interest more than historians.

Gale Mattox and Arthur Rachwald, both professors of political science at the US Naval
Academy, have edited and contributed to Enlarging NATO: The National Debates,a
collection of country-by-country reviews explaining how present NATO members, new members,
and nonmembers to the east reacted to the enlargement that was formally proposed in 1994
until the addition of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999. The essays present
a great deal of material--including public and editorial opinion, and parliamentary
debates--and will be valuable to historians trying to reconstruct the episode.

Each country handled the question differently, on the basis of its perceived national
interests, but two generalizations stand out: (1) no country (except Russia) made it a
major issue, and (2) it was an elite decision with little citizen input. Poland is an
exception, as many Poles were enthusiastic about joining. Czechs and Hungarians were
lukewarm but went along with their leaders' preferences. NATO membership offers US-backed
security and opens the door to the European Union. We might recall here that most
Spaniards did not want to join NATO, but Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, head of
a party that had been anti-NATO, persuaded his countrymen to vote for it in a 1986
referendum. His helper, trendy leftist Javier Solana, was scathing about NATO in the 1977
elections. Solana eventually became Secretary General of NATO, and an excellent one at
that. Career advantage generates its own enthusiasm. (In political science, this is called
"rational-choice theory.")

Russia paid more attention to NATO enlargement than anyone else, argues contributor
Irina Kobrinskaya of the Moscow Center of the East-West Institute. Russian politicians
played the nationalist and threat cards and claimed NATO actions in Bosnia and Kosovo
proved their point. We don't know if Moscow really believes that NATO is a threat.
Actually, NATO has some utility only if Moscow sees it as a potential threat. Balkan
deployments are more than peace operations; they are exercises and demonstrations, and it
is just as well the Russians don't like them, although polite people do not speak of such
things in public.

Thomas Szayna, as part of a RAND project for the US Air Force, presents the most
methodological and technical case in NATO Enlargement, 2000-2015. He assumes that
NATO has already transformed itself into "a true security community" and has
only a "residual collective defense function." (Then what good is it?) NATO, he
claims, has accepted a "power projection role." (Projecting into where? Into
Chechnya? The Middle East?) The fleeting references to the 1999 Kosovo campaign suggest
that Szayna had largely completed the study before Operation Allied Force. Kosovo shows
less of a security community and more of a free-rider syndrome based on US willingness to
stabilize Europe. Kosovo actually proves very little--about air power, about a
"security community," or about Washington's willingness to get involved in
something similar.

Using cost-benefit analyses, Szayna sees Slovenia joining NATO--a good value at low
cost--followed in descending order by Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as a group,
Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, and Albania. None, he admits, can contribute much military
strength. Spurious admissions criteria mean that some countries with the biggest security
problems are least likely to be admitted anytime soon. Some of the candidate countries
actually have "oversized" armies, big but poorly trained and equipped. Szayna's
contract apparently included no cost-benefit analysis of how open-ended NATO enlargement
affects US security. Szayna has a specialized chapter on how new members must upgrade
their readiness in air power.

In NATO After 2000: The Future of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, Thomas-Durell
Young, a longtime researcher at the US Army War College and now at the Naval Postgraduate
School, and the late John Borawski, by asking some devastating questions, offer an
antidote to Szayna's assumptions. Europe has never spent adequately on defense, and in the
post-Cold War spends less. Europe contributed little to Desert Storm or Kosovo. NATO's
mission has shifted massively to the Balkans, but nowhere is this written or formalized,
and this creates a consistency or hypocrisy problem: If we cover the Balkans, why not the
Caucasus or Rwanda? Young quotes French President Chirac: Does NATO "give itself the
right to intervene where it wants and when it wants"? Under what circumstances do
human-rights violations let us intervene inside a sovereign state? Have we developed new
principles of international law? Are we prepared to follow through with them? The
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe can play no role; the Serbs laughed
OSCE observers out of Kosovo.

The three books complement each other: Mattox and Rachwald on the historical evolution
of NATO expansion, Szayna on the criteria for further expansion, and Young and Borawski on
the problems of expansion. "NATO could become a relic of the past," said
Secretary of Defense William Cohen in 2000. It could, but NATO has long been fissiparous
and quarrelsome. Europeans have always resented Washington's leadership, which they now
call "unilateralism." Europeans want to build their own Rapid Reaction Force,
but--small and outside of NATO--it is unlikely to be of much use. A weakened and cautious
Russia will for some years present no threat to NATO, and that was the glue that held the
alliance together. The real test of NATO will be its ability to act in the Middle East,
where a cutoff of oil could concentrate both European and American minds.

The Reviewer: Dr. Michael G. Roskin is a professor of political science at
Lycoming College (Pa.) and in 1991-94 was a visiting professor at the US Army War College.

Review Essay

Strategic Writing on Cuba

RUSSELL W. RAMSEY

Seven years have passed since this reviewer's essay "On
Castro and Cuba: Rethinking the `Three Gs'" appeared in Parameters, and policy
lines on US-Cuban relations have hardened in both Washington, D.C., and Havana since then.
Yet there are important signals of impending policy changes emanating from both countries,
and we explore here several works which set the tone for understanding the issues,
followed by a more detailed examination of three new books which are significant
contributions to the massive literature on this topic.

In 1994, Premier Fidel Castro carried out his sweeping policy adjustments occasioned by
the collapse of the Soviet Union and its previous mentorship of Cuba. Politically, these
adjustments included the authorization of a massive economic emigration from Cuba to
Florida and the lifting of state censorship and other tight security rules affecting Cuban
relationships with foreigners visiting or living in Cuba. Economically, Castro opened the
Cuban socialist economy to allow about one-third of his population to live "outside
the revolution," which means holding a job in a growing free-market sector created
primarily by European investment and using the US dollar as primary currency. At the time
of my earlier review, most Cuba analysts concluded that the demise of Fidel Castro as
Premier and of fidelismo (passionate belief in Fidel's revolution) was imminent.
Those analysts were wrong, and the works reviewed below show why.

To appreciate what has happened in Cuba since the demise of the Soviet Union, one
should read Robert T. Buckman's chapter on Cuba in the Stryker-Post volume Latin
America 2001. Buckman shows, dispassionately, that fidelismo may seem to be an
illogical, failed policy to the outsider, but that Fidel Castro and his revolution are
deeply meaningful to the seven million or so Cubans who live within it. Their basic
necessities of life (food, first-line medical care, education, and shelter) are taken care
of in exchange for a drab economic existence in old houses with leaky roofs and utilities
that function with increasing irregularity. This judgment is corroborated by lectures
delivered by Dr. Gilberto Fleites, a Cuban oncologist, on 7 January 2000, and from Dr.
Juan Valdez Paz, a Cuban historian, on 14 January 2000, both at the Felix Varela Institute
in Havana. For an overview of where scholarship is moving on Cuba and its tumultuous
history, Robert Whitney's "History or Teleology?" in Latin American Research
Review is the best short summary. The books reviewed by Professor Whitney point
clearly to a growing emphasis on the "mambi" theme, a reference to Cuba's
non-white eastern population who have always been excluded to some degree from the
island's political system and among whom all revolutions have either started or at least
had an important strand. This view was further confirmed by Dr. Herbert Perez, another
Cuban historian at the Oriente (Eastern) University in Santiago, on 10 January 2000.

Professor Thomas C. Wright's revised (2001) edition of Latin America in the Era of
the Cuban Revolution reflects the somewhat chastened writing of the neo-Marxist left
in the United States. Gone are the romantic interpretations of Castro's role in the Cuban
struggle of 1956-1959, and of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's ill-fated filibuster in
Bolivia in 1967. Professor Wright accurately portrays the limited neo-Marxist dimensions
seen in Colombia's recent years of domestic mayhem. He continues to laud the Salvador
Allende administration of Chile and judges the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship to have been
all bad, an externally imposed pawn of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Yet I have
heard prominent Chilean Marxist scholars who suffered at the hands of General Pinochet's
terror apparatus, the DINA, state that the Allende government was ineffective, and that
the system imposed by Pinochet now calls on Chilean leftists to become social democrats
working to achieve an economic safety network for the poor. Further, Professor Wright
insists that the Nicaraguan people genuinely wanted the continuance of the Sandinista
government in 1990, while dozens of former Sandinistas state that their government was
venal, needlessly militarized, and economically counterproductive. While chastened in
tone, some US neo-Marxists within academia still cling to a governmental philosophy that
was shown by Professor Timothy Wickham-Crowley's 1992 study, Guerrillas and Revolution
in Latin America, to have little authenticity within Latin America, and appearing to
succeed (Cuba and Nicaragua) only as a result of external financial support now vanished
with the collapse of the USSR.

The book Cuba: The Contours of Change, edited by Susan Kaufman Purcell and David
Rothkopf, is the one reviewed here which will attract most readers, for it addresses the
fundamental policy questions extant between the two bad neighbors. This slim volume is a
set of essays presented at a conference series entitled "Cuba: Preparing for the
Future" conducted from April to June 2000 by the Council of the Americas, a
think-tank group often sought-after by US political leaders for advice and endorsement of
their Cuba policies. Professor Purcell is vice-president of the Americas Society and
Council of the Americas, with a long record of influential policy writing on Cuba, and she
concludes in this book that the US economic embargo of Cuba is unfortunate but necessary.
She cites the demonstrated durability of Fidel Castro's regime as evidence that his 1994
policy adjustments are not a transition to free-market economics and political democracy,
but are, in fact, a shrewd scheme for maintaining his personalistic revolution in power.
This view is opposed by Professors Andrew Zimbalist and Manuel Pastor, Jr., who see the
1994 reforms as stop-gap measures which are economically unsustainable within the greater
environment of NAFTA and the Caribbean Economic Community (CARICOM). Rabid opponents of
Fidel, however, will not take much comfort here, for Zimbalist and Pastor merely conclude
that the reforms are unstable and unsustainable, but do not see them as soon to be
replaced by sweeping neo-liberal policies in Cuba. The facts behind both of these
viewpoints were clearly sustained in lectures by the Cuban economist Dr. Julio Carranza on
7 January 2000, and by diplomatic history specialist Dr. Carlos Alzugaray on 13 January
2000, both at the Varela Institute in Havana.

Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined, edited by James G.
Blight and Peter Kornbluh, revisits the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961. It does for the
failed invasion by an exile force what Dino A. Brugioni's 1991 book Eyeball to Eyeball,
and Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith's 1994 book Operation ANADYR did for
the November 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Politics of Illusion uses actual
participants' accounts to establish what happened, at a time when major documents have
just been declassified. This book too will draw much blood, like the Brugioni book and the
Gribkov and Smith work, for both liberals and conservatives among the US inventory of
policymakers on Cuba love to throw ideological bombshells at one another. What emerges
from a careful reading of Politics of Illusion is a sad realization of three
points. The United States, with all its massive resources and strategic advantages,
developed very few workable options to the ill-conceived invasion. Each bureaucratic
entity of the US government protected its own interests and image. No one, until President
John F. Kennedy's final announcement of the tragic failure, took overall responsibility
for conceiving and guaranteeing a coordinated strategy. So, as the book concludes, all
parties indulged themselves in the politics of illusion and rendered flawed judgments.
That appraisal squares with my own exposure to the planners of the era as well.

A book to love in this cluster is the photo-rich Cuban Miami, by Robert M.
Levine and Moises Asis. Here we see the superbly energetic and creative side of the Cuban
character, bound together by the tragedy of losing their homeland, but free to achieve in
the country that still applauds Jacksonian Democracy. They are all represented here: the
baseball stars, the dancers, the cartoonists, the architects, the housewives, and the
domino players. Because the news media have presented the Cuban exile community as an
orchestrated mob of howling anti-Castro right-wingers, this book is a charming,
refreshing, and long-overdue antidote. Furthermore, it contains many well-written pages of
sociologically precise detail to accompany the superb photography. With this book, one
sees the glory and the shame of the Cuban Revolution--the glory of what Cuba could now be
under a climate of genuine democratic freedom, and the shame of having its talented people
driven from their homes while those who remained built a dysfunctional welfare state on
pillars of mythology.

The books reviewed here lead me to the same conclusions of my essay seven years
ago--namely, that Fidel Castro has dug in for the long haul, and that the Cuban economy
can stumble along for a few more years, sustained by a loyal leadership that glories more
in the revolution than in the joys of neo-liberal economics. But one new conclusion also
occurs: The time is nigh to apply the US policy of engagement. An exchange of diplomatic,
cultural, economic, police, and military figures between the two countries, with careful
attention to the nominations of the Cuban exile community, would create multiple links
through which a gloriously endowed Caribbean island could reach its potential as a
significant and respected nation.

The Reviewer: Russell W. Ramsey, Ph.D., D.Min., is Distinguished Visiting
Professor from Troy State University to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation, founded in January 2001, at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Review Essay

Codebreaking in World War II

ARTHUR C. WINN

The three books reviewed here cannot be read just once--not if
the reader wants to gain the most complete picture of American and British activities
(independent, competitive, and cooperative) with regard to World War II codebreaking. Nor
if the reader desires an understanding of the interrelationships, and at times lack
thereof, among the military services and the various American and British government
agencies which were, or wanted to be, directly involved in codebreaking. As the authors
clearly show, the interrelationships were at times cooperative, at times marked by
bureaucratic internecine warfare.

Stephen Budiansky is a correspondent for The Atlantic. He received a master's
degree in applied mathematics from Harvard and has worked on classified military studies
as a Congressional Fellow. The theme in his Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of
Codebreaking in World War II is in the subtitle of his book. This work is
comprehensive and thorough. Only time will tell if his story is "complete" in
the absolute sense of the word.

David Alvarez is a professor of politics at Saint Mary's College of California. His
research for his book Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930-1945
was completed while he held an appointment as a scholar-in-residence at the National
Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History. The principal theme is an appraisal of
the role of codebreaking in the formulation of diplomatic policy. As the author notes, the
opening date coincides with the creation of the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service
(SIS), so his book is also an operational history of SIS. He does not address codebreaking
in the military or naval spheres.

Maurice Freedman served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command No. 100 (Special
Signals) Group during World War II. After the war he pursued a career in public
administration, teaching, and journalism. He has been a regular lecturer on Ultra
(Enigma-based intelligence) and related issues. The theme in his Unravelling Enigma
is the codebreaking carried out at Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Britain's
Government Code and Cypher School. Freedman refers to it as "Britain's greatest
twentieth-century achievement," the essence of which was decoding and intelligence
processing on an industrial scale.

All three authors emphasize that people were the key factor in the codebreaking efforts
in Britain and the United States. They identify key personnel and provide examples of
their contributions. Freedman notes that the results achieved were founded on
"previous experience, mathematics, language, and psychology, as well as some bright
ideas, and were nothing if not shrewd, well-informed, and intelligent." The people
"were drawn from a section of society loosely called `intellectuals,' not a group
particularly favoured by the military." At times he refers to them as
"boffins," an essentially British term probably best defined as a government
scientific technician who appears unconventional or absent-minded.

Most of those involved had little or no prior experience with cryptology. Alvarez
mentions a 24-year-old math teacher who accepted a position as a junior mathematician with
the US Army Signal Intelligence Service. He had no idea of what a junior cryptanalyst did,
but he knew what a crypt was and guessed that the job had something to do with military
cemeteries. The young man, Frank Rowlett, was later to head the General Cryptanalytic
Branch at Arlington Hall.

Although Alvarez's focus is the period from 1930 through the end of World War II, he
does highlight some earlier episodes--as early as the American Revolution. These episodes
suggest an amateur and unsystematic approach to codebreaking that characterized American
activities in the field well into the 20th century. He writes, "No one in Washington
thought that the interception and decryption of secret messages was sufficiently useful to
the United States government to require some system and organization." At least not
until June 1917 when the US Army established a cipher office, known as MI-8, in its
Military Intelligence Branch. The office was entrusted to Herbert Yardley who, as Alvarez
and Budiansky show, became both famous and infamous.

Alvarez notes that despite MI-8's successes in solving foreign diplomatic codes during
World War I, there is no evidence that this had any effect on American diplomacy during
the war or during the Versailles Peace Conference. He attributes this to President
Wilson's distaste for espionage and his resistance to the influence of any intelligence,
let alone that from intercepting diplomatic traffic.

Following World War I, the Cipher Bureau (perhaps more widely known as the American
Black Chamber) was created with funding shared by the War Department and the State
Department. The high point in its history occurred during the Washington Conference on the
Limitation of Armaments in November 1921 when the Cipher Bureau provided the US Secretary
of State advance information on Japan's negotiating strategy.

After the Washington Conference, Japan was the only significant power whose messages
were regularly read. Alvarez and Budiansky highlight the problem as one of intercept.
Without message traffic, the most skilled analysts are helpless. During the war,
censorship on all international communications and copies of all foreign diplomatic cables
entering or leaving the United States had been automatically provided to MI-8 by the
censorship authorities. After the war, these sources of raw traffic stopped. State
Department funding was also stopped by US Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who believed
it was inappropriate for the State Department to engage in covert activities of any sort.
The American Black Chamber ceased operations in May 1929.

In April 1929, the Military Intelligence Division, the War Plans Division, and the
Signal Corps agreed on a plan to consolidate the Army's code compilation and code solution
activities in a new Signal Corps unit, the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). William
Friedman was appointed principal cryptanalyst and effective director of the SIS. Both
Alvarez and Budiansky trace the development of SIS and its activities through the end of
World War II.

David Alvarez sums up his view of codebreaking and American diplomacy during this
critical period in his final paragraph:

The President's failure to grasp the diplomatic advantage proffered by signals
intelligence would have marginalized the codebreakers even if their efforts had not been
constrained by operational difficulties. Together, the various factors ensured that, for
all its expansion and achievement, signals intelligence would have little appreciable
impact on American diplomacy in the period 1930-1945.

Maurice Freedman notes that successful decoding during World War I led to the creation
of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) as an interservice organization (due
to the disastrous lack of cooperation in intelligence matters during the war). He writes
that the name was "probably devised by some Foreign Office wag." Budiansky notes
that the name was "dreamed up" by the head of the Foreign Office's Communication
Department, Courtenay Forbes.

Both Freedman and Budiansky provide examples of agreements and disagreements over the
handling of the deciphering/decoding of diplomatic and military intelligence. They also
address the relationships between GC&CS and the service intelligence
directorates--which at times, as Freedman describes it, "was one of stalemate."

Freedman and Budiansky also cite operational examples in which Ultra, as well as
direction finding and traffic analysis, was used with and without success throughout World
War II, in North Africa, in Europe, during the Battle of the Atlantic, and in countering
U-boat operations. They also cite examples where commanders chose not to believe the
signals intelligence. For example, Budiansky in his comments about the Battle of the Bulge
notes that Ultra had provided ample warnings of the German attack. However, the Allied
generals who looked at the situation as professional military men had concluded that the
German army was simply too battered to go on the attack, a view held by the German
generals as well. It was Hitler who disagreed with both and ordered the attack.

Budiansky also addresses US codebreaking operations against the Japanese. He examines
the Japanese diplomatic Purple cipher (intelligence from it was code-named MAGIC) as well
as the Japanese Fleet General Purpose Code. The author notes that intercepted Purple
messages of 3 and 6 December 1941 indicated that Japan was about to go to war with the
United States. However, not a single Japanese Fleet message (which would have contained
details) was read by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Following the war, when
cryptanalysts examined the unread traffic, they found some of the details. Although none
of the messages specifically mentioned Pearl Harbor, Budiansky points out that had the
pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese Fleet traffic been decoded and read at the time, it would have
certainly conveyed heavy hints about the attack. That it was not decoded was partly a
matter of manpower and partly one of priority. MAGIC was such a dazzling find that it
blinded its possessors to possible attack information that lay buried among Japanese Fleet
supply orders and maneuvers. Lesson to be learned: Consider the potential ramifications of
priorities.

The Japanese Fleet Code was broken in March 1942. Budiansky provides an excellent
summary of the key role it played in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and of the
relationships of key individuals--i.e., Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, Station Hypo
officer in charge; Captain Edwin Layton, Pacific Fleet intelligence officer; and Commander
John H. Redman, in command of OP-20-G. According to Budiansky, Redman at first claimed
that Rochefort was wrong in identifying Midway as a Japanese target and then after the
battle tried to claim sole credit. As Budiansky writes, "The denouement of the Battle
of Midway was not one of the US Navy's finest hours."

Budiansky and Freedman address the functioning of the Enigma machines and the various
aids and machines used in codebreaking. They include pictures and excellent appendices.
Budiansky's Appendix A provides an excellent chronology of cryptanalysis-related events
from 1923 until the surrender of Japan in 1945. Readers who are cryptologists will
appreciate the talent that went into developing the machines; readers who are not will
find themselves grabbing a pencil and paper and working through the examples they provide.

These three books are not the first to address codebreaking during World War II. And
they certainly will not be the last to do so. But together they do highlight some areas
for the reader's consideration: analytical aptitude, knowledge databases, linguistic
skills, machine translations, statistical security, enemy and friendly operating
procedures, interpretation and evaluation of incomplete signals information, diplomatic
and military operational use, source protection, measurements of success. Questions and
the answers in each of these subject areas will forever be related to the conditions and
attendant circumstances at particular moments in time.

The Reviewer: Colonel Arthur C. Winn, USA Ret., has worked for the past 20 years
for civilian professional service firms as a program manager and senior analyst on DOD-
and Army-sponsored targeting and intelligence systems programs. He retired from the
Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College in 1979 after more than 30 years of
active service as a Corps of Engineer, Special Forces, and Military Intelligence officer,
with tours in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Germany, and as the Assistant US Army Attaché in
Israel.